RachaelArticle

How Well Should a High School Graduate Read?

By Lois E. Burrill

How well should a high school graduate read? How often is this question asked by faculty and administration in schools. If they don’t have reading/comprehension skills when they graduate chances of them gaining or improving these skills seems minimal. “In many school systems, formal instruction in reading (except for a few students) stops after grade six, and in most systems only the most disabled readers have instruction after grade eight.” The reading scale of text difficulty that Burrill introduces in this article is used in the Degrees of Reading Power program or is referred to as the DRP. The DRP is arranged in units from 1 to 100. The easiest text written would be about 30 units to 85 units which is the hardest written text in the English language. An example of 34 DRP: “Bears are big. They need a lot of food. Bears eat meat.” They eat bugs. An example of 84 DRP: “Jefferson’s preference for an agrarian society and his idealization of the independent farmer reflected a conviction that representative government required a secure and relatively prosperous economic base to function successfully.” The article then discusses different types of reading that is common in our society. Looking a newspapers, on the DRP scale they fall between 65 and 67 units. The article on the front page of the newspaper was usually the most difficult article in the paper, while articles from the sports pages were usually less difficult with a DRP between 58-64 DRP. One interesting fact involving the paper was mentioned. “Three Washington papers were selected that had served major cities for the last 60 years. A total of 72 articles were obtained for the same month and day at 20 year interval, from 1923-1983. The readability analyses of the articles revealed that there had been no significant changes in the difficulty of the newspaper articles during this 60 year span.” In high school the average 9th grader can read about 51 DRP at the Independent level with a 90 percent ability to comprehend. This falls just below children’s magazines on the chart. Usually a high school student is expected to read and comprehend high school text book on their own, outside of class. So there does seem to be a gap between reading instruction and the ability of our students to read and comprehend what is presented and expected of them.

Rachael Warren SCKWP 2007